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G'day all!

I've started painting up some IG and was wondering what you guys thought of the colour scheme and the basing that I'm trying. I've painted about 20 infantry and a tank in this scheme, but this is the first one that I've based.





Now I'm an Australian who has only seen snow twice in my life, both 16+ years ago when I was a kid, so if it looks terribly unrealistic that might be why

The other alternative I was thinking was doing a desert style base. I was thinking desert because it'd contrast well with the grey of the IG uniform. I kinda like the snow as well though, for one I also have Space Puppies (that also aren't based yet!) and if in the future I ever plan to ally the armies together, going for snow bases on both would be a really unifying feature.

What do you think? I'm open to any suggestions, this is only the first model I have based so far.

EDIT: Changed the images to my gallery images instead of imageshack.

EDIT2: Took some photos of one of my Space Pups to show how it looks...

that kind of looks like wet snow...
what i suggest is getting some snow flock and some water effect, mix those together and put that on your bases...

i would really go for a snow base, that will really compliment your (btw good looking) paintjob more then a brown yellowish desert themed base would

Yeah I wasn't sure about the snow flock. I've seen some pictures that look really good and others that look a bit more "meh" and I haven't seen any in person to know how good (or not good) it looks.

That picture is more a proof of concept of snow, I think it looks not too bad but I'm still not sure what path to go down with making snow. I've read about snow flock or bicarb + paint + PVA or people just mixing fine grain sand into white paint but it's often hard to see from images how it actually turns out and different people claiming to use similar techniques often produce very different looking results.

My snow looks a bit like toothpaste or something at the moment It's just thick layers of Ceramite White built up and textured with the bristles of an old toothbrush, then a thick layer of gloss varnish before a final layer of Ceramite White I just put on reasonably thick and didn't texture to give the smooth somewhat glassy finish. My goal was melting snow similar to the images you see if you google "melting snow"...

Like this...
http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=7204&picture=melting-snow

(4th image down)
http://caroleknits.net/2009/03/09/a-warm-saturday/

http://deeperbeige.com/site/sensible/photography/images/Melting.jpg

But yeah, still not sure which way to go to get better looking snow.

I'll post a picture of one of my Space Pups tomorrow if I can (night time now and since I don't have a photo station I need natural lighting ).

I would actually go for desert base. You don't get to see alot of those much, but snow bases are becoming really popular (soon we'll have hipsters saying they made snow bases before it was cool )

I think the desert base would look good, but think of what kind of desert it is. Snady? Rocky? Terrestrial? Martian? Dead world?

I was thinking sandy, the sort you might see on a Tomb Kings army. Done with Armageddon Dust texture paint, washed with Sepia and then drybrushed some sort of pale yellowish-boney colour. I haven't done a mock up of the sand base because I haven't bought any Armageddon Dust.

I suppose I could do something like a reddish-orange desert, kinda like an Australian desert outback, not sure how I'd go about doing that though!

Hmm, too many choices!

Well that's an urban camo scheme, maybe something like that?

What are you using currently to make the snow?

When I started them I wasn't really thinking urban camo so much as "generic future soldier ready for the meat grinder on some unknown planet". I was kind of inspired by the Starship Troopers movies (terrible movies that I none the less love to watch over and over again ). Where I imagine soldiers are cheap and since they could be sent anywhere, just outfit them in basic grey uniforms.

The snow is just layered white paint, textured with the bristles of a toothbrush (wait for the paint to semi-dry then press the bristles into it). It's not necessarily how I want the final snow to look, it's just I currently don't have any fake snow products to test so just went with layered paint to see how it looked. The snow definitely needs a bit of texture to it which it lacks at the moment.

EDIT: I had a look at some model train forums and (if I go with the snow) I'll pick up some Woodland Scenics Soft Snow. It looks like it'll give a good snow-like texture over my currently toothpaste looking snow.

Updated the first post with some pics of my Space Wolf.

It's not awesomely painted or anything, but just to give you an idea of how my Pups look

What do you think of the snow base on the combined IG and SW?